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Friday, August 05, 2016

Trading With the United States is a Task for the Cuban Military

Trading With the United States is a Task for the Cuban Military / Juan
Juan Almeida

Juan Juan Almeida, 11 July 2106 — On April 22, 2016, the U.S. State
Department revised Section 515.582 of the Cuban Assets Control
Regulations, which now establishes that goods and services produced by
independent Cuban entrepreneurs on the island can be exported to the
United States. The Government of Cuba has had for a while, as an
experiment, a clever strategy that applies today and is baptized with
the emphatic name of "Associative and Cooperative Operation of
Productive Troops." It's not transparency; it's a matter of publicity.

The American Government's method is to offer new and better business
opportunities to the Cuban private sector. The response of the island
government is to distort the scheme and confound U.S. institutions. As
already noted in the preceding paragraph, now they have to do the
paperwork. The plan is simple: transform the military corps that is part
of the productive ground troops of the Cuban Armed Forces into small,
false groups of independent producers.

One thing that stands out among the skilled actions that the Great State
of the Armed Forces of Cuba is implementing to make political currency
from its exports is the change in cooperation between the Army and "Plan
Turquino." This development program, founded in 1987 and alluding to the
highest elevation in Cuba, gave priority to the economic, political and
environmental development of Cuba's mountainous zones. The emphasis was
on the production of coffee, cocoa, sugarcane, various crops, cattle
development, forestal activities and services. These have already been
transferred to fictitious civilian entities, created under the profile
of private cooperatives but clearly directed by sergeants and/or
lieutenants from the different provinces.

Concrete examples of this shiny disguise are a coffee plantation of the
El Salvador municipality, two of Yateras and one of Maisí, which, until
yesterday, belonged to the Territorial Military Headquarters of
Guantánamo Province, and presently appear registered as farming
associations.

The same thing is happening in Santiago de Cuba. Two coffee farms of the
III Frente municipality and two of the II Frente are in the phase of
documental masking in order to demonstrate and convince the U.S. of
their "entrepreneurial independence."

In Granma province, various coffee farms are in a similar process of
subverting the documentation: four in the Buey Arriba municipality, two
in Guisa and one in Bartolomé Masó. And in Cienfuegos, the same thing is
happening with two coffee fields in the Cumanayagua municipality that
pretend to pass from the olive-green cap to the yarey sombrero.

It's curious to hear, from morning to night, that these new
entrepreneurial economic organizations, which supposedly function
independently from the State, count among their assets such top
technology equipment as coffee pulping machines (recently imported),
bulldozers and trucks, in addition to the disinterested collaboration of
the army camps that, "voluntarily," are ready to replace the deficit of
the coffee workforce on the island.

What they're after with this idea is to camouflage squads of soldiers
under a very-well-designed facade of worker associations with management
autonomy to export the product to the United States, without any "ifs,
ands or buts."

For the time being, Cuban soldiers have placed special interest on the
subject of coffee.